Israeli and Diaspora Jews Reaching for Each Other
Israeli and Diaspora Jews had a breakthrough at the Jewish Leaders’ Conference led by Cherie Brown, the International Liberation Reference Person for Jews, and Tim Jackins in Israel last year. The two groups have been longing to make real connections with each other but have had to learn how to do this. I loved how much Cherie prioritized it. We were pushed to get to know and work with each other. We learned a lot.
As I listened to Diaspora Jews from outside the United States, I understood that USers have a particular piece of work to do. I called a topic group for USers. We worked on where we attach frozen hopes, longings, and disappointments to Israel. Also, the United States is the owning class of the world and plays one of the most destructive roles. We feel bad about this and have been slow to work on it, which muddies our relationships with Israelis. Finally, I said that Israel is a resource for all Jews and makes a difference in our lives and that Israelis make this possible with their bodies and pay a price for it by living with war.
Cherie asked me to participate in an experiment in which Israeli and Diaspora Jews reached for and spoke directly to each other across their divisions. I was to speak about what I wanted Israelis to understand about my life. I said that Israel had been an important force in my life since I was young. (I had to have several sessions to even start to think about how to say it.) All of us struggled to communicate on a subject we have many painful feelings about. In sessions and conversations afterward, I had these new thoughts:
- What if Diaspora Jewish life is just as important for Jewish survival as Israel is? Israel needs Jewish communities outside of it for building needed alliances. And Jewish life in the Diaspora needs to continue developing in the forms it has taken for thousands of years.
- Diaspora Jews pay a heavy price for living in Gentile-dominated countries, but we rarely notice this because we are so resigned to it. (Maybe we glimpse it when we come home from a visit to Israel.) Anti-Semitism surrounds us, making us feel like we have to hide and apologize for our existence. In the last generation or so, our oppression has mostly not taken the form of physical harm, at least in the United States and Western Europe. It’s been more like an internal compromise—like agreeing to and participating in conditions that are bad for us—and this can be hard to work on because it seems like the air that we breathe.
- Because we struggle to fully face our oppression where we live, it is hard to see Israelis as our cousins who can be our allies.
[See the next page for the Hebrew version of this article, translated by Dan Alter.]
Berkeley, California, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of Jews
(Present Time 198, January 2020)